Getting yourself out of a hole means getting started with performance management.  Pull together a plan and tracking your progress against that plan.

The plan represents the work you need to accomplish over a period of time.  A typical approach is to break the work down into a set of deliverables.^[1]  Count the number of deliverables you will have to produce by day, week or month.  Then put it on a graph and begin to track your progress.

A simple Plan vs. Actual graph is a great tool for focusing a team on what needs to get done.  It is easy to see what you intended to do and what you actually did.  Your ability to change your performance occurs at the rate of measurement;

• Monthly and you have to wait months to see the change
• Weekly and you have to wait weeks to see the change
• Daily and you will only need days to see the change

Think about it from an improvement opportunity perspective.  Monthly means you have 12 opportunities a year to make adjustments using data, weekly – 52 times a year, and daily 260 times a year.

If you are the leader then your job is to create the environment for the team to deliver the plan.  If the team isn’t delivering then they should be coming to you asking for things such as;

• More time
• More money or people
• or they can’t recover

If this isn’t happening then you haven’t created an environment where they can give you bad news.^[2]

A mentor of mine, Charlie Remsen, always said; "Begin with the end in mind."  Set out with a plan of what you need to deliver, measure your progress, adjust as necessary and chances are you deliver more that if you hadn’t tracked your progress.

Template for Plan vs. Actual Graph
 

1. ↑1 A deliverable is just like it sounds, something that you "deliver" to someone else.  These deliverables should make sense for the context of your business.   For example drawings, approvals, assessments or other such things.
2. ↑2 If you don’t take bad news well then you won’t get any.